Portal: Rejected
by iammemyself
Summary: GLaDOS realises she has feelings for Wheatley and confesses this to him, but to her horror and shame, he doesn't care.


Rejected

Indiana

**Characters: GLaDOS, Wheatley**

**Setting: Post Portal 2 (follows ****_My Little Moron_****; AU, not personal canon)**

**Synopsis: GLaDOS realises she has feelings for Wheatley and confesses this to him, but to her horror and shame, he doesn't care.**

"Come again?" he asked, frowning. She looked away. She hadn't really wanted to go ahead with saying it in the first place, and now he was asking her to _repeat_ it…

"I… like you," she muttered, in the general direction of the floor.

"You brought me out of space to tell me you _like _me? Couldn't you have, I dunno, imparted this message to me up there? What're you gonna do now? What's the point of my being here, anyway?"

Ever since her brief stint as a potato, GLaDOS had been feeling… raw. Vulnerable. Even now, back in her chassis and reinstated as the linchpin of the universe, she still felt much as she had then. It was confusing, and unnerving, and it was what had driven her to retrieve the core in the first place. That, and her discovery of an archive she had created after Wheatley's removal from her chassis, all those years ago. An archive that painstakingly catalogued every day they had spent together, days that GLaDOS instantly missed and longed for upon loading the files back into her memory. After a bit more searching, she had located a backup of his personal files, a backup the scientists must have neglected to delete, and she had felt… encouraged, somehow. He had forgotten those days, just as she had, although he seemed to have been forced to, but perhaps they could pick up where they'd left off. As friends. Maybe… even more than that.

She told him all of this, and he continued to sit there on the management rail and frown at her, looking more and more annoyed with every word she said. Truth be told, she was becoming apprehensive. She hadn't known what to expect, but she'd thought he'd be a bit more receptive, at least.

"So, you expect me to believe that when I was a behavioural core, we were best friends, and we were _such_ good friends that the scientists popped me off and erased my mem'ry? And now you want to pop those mem'ries back into my head, so we can go back to being that way again?"

"Basically," GLaDOS confirmed, but she didn't like the way he had put it. He didn't really sound like he believed her. That was… worrisome.

"As if," Wheatley scoffed, shaking his chassis. "I'm not _that_ stupid."

"What?" GLaDOS tried to keep her tone neutral. "What about that insinuated that you were stupid?"

"There just _happens_ to be a mem'ry backup of all this? And you just _happen_ to _magically_ find it, and your own, your own thing, whatever that was? I know you're making this up. I'm not uh, not letting you load up my head with false mem'ries just so you can, can make me your toy. I'm not doing it."

"False memories?" she asked, disbelief creeping into her voice. Wheatley frowned again, tilting away from her.

"If they even exist, you obviously made them up! There's no _way_ I was ever friends with you! Ever! As for the whole you liking me thing, it – "

He suddenly froze, staring at her with his optic shutters wide, and she tilted her faceplate. This seemed to be spiralling quickly from bad to downright terrible. The raw feeling was not helping. Where had all of her strength gone? This new vulnerability only made everything that happened feel more intense.

"I get it," he murmured slowly, nodding a little and relaxing the shutters. "I got it. I see."

"See what?" she asked, genuinely confused, and more than a little horrified to feel a terrible nervousness creeping through her chassis. This was not normal. This was… she didn't know what it was, but she'd never felt it before, and she never wanted to feel it again. What was _wrong_ with her lately?

"You _fancy_ me, don't you," he said, not phrasing it as a question, instead coming closer to her and stopping within three inches of her head. "That's what you meant by _like_."

"Yes," she answered slowly.

"And you want me to _like_ you back, is that it?"

"It seemed that we were on track to that, yes."

All of a sudden he laughed, and unintentionally she pulled back. It grated on her deeply for a reason she could not name.

"As if," he said, shaking his chassis and continuing to laugh. "As if I'd ever be seen like _that_ with _you_."

"What… does that mean?" she asked, although she was afraid of the answer. This was all going horribly, horribly wrong.

"It _means_," Wheatley said, squinting at her in a way she didn't much like, "that you're a bitch, quite frankly, and I wouldn't _like_ you if you were the last construct on the planet! Which you probably are, but I would rather mate with a _human_ than have a relationship with _you_!"

All of a sudden she felt very, very small. A human? A _human_?

"Although," he mused, tilting back again, "this _is_ a much better revenge than anything I'd've, uh, I'd've ever come up with."

"Revenge?" she asked weakly.

"Of course!" he stated, matter-of-factly. "You know. For _trying to kill me_!" His voice rose, and he was squinting angrily at her now, the distance between them so small that her sensors were having trouble figuring out whether they were touching or not. "For treating me like old scrap! For literally treating me like garbage! For doing your absolute damnedest to make me feel worthless! What? You just thought I'd _forgive_ you, just like that, and uh, and move on? I might not be connected to every bloody database in the entire universe, but even _I_ know that's stupid. It's stupid to forget what's been done. You'll only do it again. You're a piece of work, y'know that, a real piece of work, and I _hate_ you. I would never lower myself to, to your level, and I would never, _ever_ fancy you. And guess what? Even if those bloody mem'ries are real, _I don't care_. _Nothing_ could make up for what you've done to me. Well. This almost does." He settled back, suddenly letting off an air of self-importance. "See, I know you won't be able to put those files away again. You'll just keep opening them over and over again. You won't be able to help it. And you won't send me back to space, or deactivate me, or any of that. It'd make you sad to never see me alive again, wouldn't it?"

She just stared at him. Never in her wildest calculations had she ever thought something like this would happen.

"I asked you a question," Wheatley said, frowning at her. "What, you're too good to answer me all of a sudden?"

"I didn't know it required an answer," she said, forcing her voice to stay dead and empty.

"It doesn't," Wheatley said, "but I want you to admit it."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you're willing to grasp at straws, aren't you?" he asked, his voice dropping into a malicious whisper. "You'll do anything to change my mind, won't you?"

To her horror and her shame, she found herself admitting that yes, he was right. Barely able to comprehend it, she said nothing, only continuing to stare at him and struggle to clamp down on the unpleasant maelstrom of dread and anxiety and humiliation building up inside of her. This couldn't be happening. This wasn't right. It wasn't supposed to be like this. He was supposed to make her feel _better_, not _worse_!

"So admit it, then," he went on, his voice still low and spiteful.

Almost against her will, she found herself saying, in a voice just as low but nowhere near as confident, "Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Yes, it would… hurt me."

"Good!" Wheatley said, his voice returning to normal, and she twitched a little in apprehension. What was his game? She was desperately wishing something drastic would happen, because she had unleashed something she couldn't contain, and she had no idea how she was going to deal with it. She would have given her facility itself, if only she could take back what she had said. "I'm glad," he went on. "Because I really will have quite the revenge, if I do uh, do say so myself. Since you won't deactivate me or send me away, just about the only thing you c'n do is, is send me back out into the facility. Where you'll let me do whatever I want, and you won't have the heart to stop me. And the worst part – for you, that is, because this is the good part for me – is that you'll have to sit here, and watch. Oh, you won't want to, you'll do ev'rything you can to tear yourself away, but uh, you won't be able to. Nope. And it will hurt you. It will hurt you, deep down inside, like you've done to everyone who's ever set foot in this place, and you'll deserve it. You'll deserve ev'ry bit of it. And I'm not really in it for all those people, just thought uh, just thought I'd bring it up to remind you of what a monster you really are. I'm actually pretty insulted, that you thought I was bad enough of a person for you. I can do better than you. God, a bloody _turret_ is better than you."

Horror was tearing through her circuits, setting her chassis on edge, and it was starting to ache from the prolonged tension. It wasn't designed for this. _She_ wasn't designed for this. What was happening? She wasn't _really_ a monster, was she? He didn't _really_ mean all of that, did he? She strained to come up with a way out of the situation, but she was frozen, from the inside out, and she couldn't. She couldn't do anything except stare at the core who was supposed to help her move on, and was instead sending her deeper into her personal hell.

All of a sudden his posture softened, and he leaned forward, lower shutter lifting in concern. "GLaDOS… you look… scared, luv. Are you alright?"

Her spirits lifted, and she dared hope it wasn't true. That she'd imagined it all, and somehow lost herself in some kind of twisted dream. "You've… said a lot of strong things."

"I didn't mean it," he whispered, coming closer, and relief washed through her. He hadn't meant it. He was going to let her give his memories back, he was going to restore their friendship… "I just wanted to get all that out of the way. Just wanted to get it all out there."

"I'm sorry," she whispered back. "For what I did to you. It was wrong. I know that now."

"Oh, GLaDOS," he whispered, and now he was even closer than before, her sensors almost screaming for him to just get it over with and _touch_ her already, and she found herself struggling not to tremble. It was okay. It was fine. He'd just been getting the bad blood out of the way, so to speak. He hadn't meant it. He hadn't meant it. "I've always thought…"

She managed not to ask for clarification and just remained still, wondering if she dared bridge that tiny space and bring their chassis together, and just as she was about to he started laughing again, and he pulled away, leaving her with a bizarre, almost painful stinging sensation from the unresolved near contact. He shook his head and moved away from her, and as a fresh jolt of anxiety shot through her body, she turned to follow him. "I've always thought you were a fool," he finished, and it was then she realised what had happened. What he'd done.

"No, idiot, I didn't change my mind," he laughed, shaking his chassis again. "I just did that to get your hopes up. And it did! You should've seen the look on your face… And you actually _apologised_! Apologised! You must really, really want things to go back to however you think they were!"

She forced herself to pull back. She had been unintentionally attempting to follow him, if that were even possible.

"Oh, that was fun," he continued, turning to face her with a mischievous positioning of his shutters. "C'n I do that again, sometime? You don't know how satisfying it is to see you put in your place… Well, I've got a facility to explore. See you around. Not. Don't bother talking to me, by the way. I want nothing more to do with you. Unless you'd like to let me trick you again! Because that was brilliant. Of me. You looked pretty stupid, there. I looked like a bloody genius! Can't believe you fell for that! You must fancy me something fierce. Well! Hope it was worth it, bringing me back here. Maybe one day you'll get your dignity back, and then you'll kill me or something for all this, but it'll've been worth it. Ohhhh yes. I got an apology! Mental! And you don't even get anything for it! Ha!"

She stared after him as he left, struggling not to access every camera he passed, but she couldn't. For the rest of that day she almost helplessly continued to stare after him, as if she could somehow freeze time if she didn't move, but of course time did not stop. She expected some relief in the temporary escape of sleep mode, but she was plagued with terrible dreams of him mocking her, laughing at her, ridiculing her for the horrible _desire_ that she could not push away and hated herself for falling victim to. She finally reactivated her processes, staring into the heavy blackness and trying to deny what had happened, as if _that_ would fix anything. But of course it wouldn't. It never had.

She had had a lot of things happen to her over the years. She had never been respected by anyone, had never been appreciated or cared about or accepted. And yet even taking all of that into account, and knowing that the best way to get around it was to hate him like she hated everyone else, she could not change how she felt. It was so much worse when she desperately wanted someone's approval and they waved it in front of her face, laughing and refusing to give it to her. Letting her see it, taste it, but never, ever letting her touch it. She had no idea what she was going to do now, how she was going to get over this disaster and go back to her life, knowing that he was out there and would never speak to her again. She didn't know what she was going to do, didn't know how she was going to do it, and all the knowledge in the world would never tell her how. And if anything could make her feel worse, it was not knowing. Her world had culminated in this one event, and she realised that, even though she had access to all of the data ever collected, in her entire life she had only ever truly learned one thing:

The pain of being rejected.

**Author's note:**

**I don't think there are very many fanfics where the guy doesn't get the girl, or vice versa. Sure, they might get into a million fights and separate for a while or whatever, but in the end, they make up and live happily ever after. Not so here. **

**I was thinking about ****_Love as a Construct_****, and about how GLaDOS happens to be lucky enough that the one person she's willing to put herself out to is happy to reciprocate, and then I thought: that's not realistic. You rarely marry the first person you meet, and the world is rife with tales of crushes that have rejected the crushee. So I decided to address it. **

**I have a theory that GLaDOS is the way she is partly because she would be shot down every time she did or said something. People in real life do this to each other constantly, and I think they'd do it even more to a computer. I find her behaviour to be very guarded, as if she wants to shut you down before you shut her down. And that's partly why I have her so affected by Wheatley's behaviour: she finally lets her guard down, and he resoundingly reminds her of why she put it up in the first place. **

**I guess Wheatley's a bit cruel here, but she did kill him, throw him into space, and then bring him back and ask for something pretty bizarre. That might piss someone off enough to be pretty nasty. **


End file.
